


no rules in breakable heaven

by ivyrobinson



Series: clandestine meetings [1]
Category: Anastasia (1997), Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23350354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyrobinson/pseuds/ivyrobinson
Summary: canon divergent collection of scenes where dmitry and anya spend a lot of time hooking up in between scenes of the musical
Relationships: Dimitri | Dmitry/Anya | Anastasia Romanov (Anastasia 1997 & Broadway)
Series: clandestine meetings [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974949
Comments: 13
Kudos: 69





	no rules in breakable heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [piecesofgold](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piecesofgold/gifts).



“You know the women of the Tochka tell the soldiers everything,” Anya comments to Dmitry idly one night as he picks up the books and papers of the history of the Romanov empire. 

She sits on the floor and watches him as he works. They said she was a Grand Duchess, so she will act like one. 

“I know,” Dmitry says, dropping a rather large book beside her and causing her to jump. “They have to, the soldiers are their best clients.” 

“They don’t tell about you,” Anya points out. Dmitry did crime in plain sight. She could see his schemes out of the corner of her eye as she swept most days. She doesn’t know how she didn’t notice him before she met him. But then again, maybe he was good at what he did.

Dmitry crouches down by her, fussing with a few of the photo books, “So?”

She reaches over and pokes his leg lightly with her foot, “What do you give them in return for their silence?”

He leans in, their lips a mere breath away from kissing, “Would you like to find out?”

“No,” she responds, biting the inside of her lip to keep it from moving that short distance. The air between them feels electric and she’s trying her best to ignore the implication. “Not tonight.”

He grins, and she almost tilts her head up anyway, but then he pulls away, standing back up. They were done for the evening. 

-

The worst part of the lessons of being a proper Lady/Grand Duchess were the clothes. It went against nature (aka her life where she had to stand most of the day) to come home and try to learn to walk in heels. The day before, she had taken them off and thrown one at Vlad and one at Dmitry and demanded they walk around in them. Dmitry had merely picked it up by the heel, and said dryly that he didn’t think it’d fit his toe, let alone his foot. She had stormed out of the theater in an unfortunate huff.

So on this day, Vlad had greeted her soothingly, saying she needed to learn to walk in these or else she’d injure herself when it came to meet the dowager. She was fairly certain if she was Anastasia, she’d have been around her grandmother without heels before. Dmitry had stood back, his mouth shut most likely per Vlad’s orders. 

And she had walked and tripped and hobbled and then finally floated. She resisted the urge to throw the shoe again if she heard the phrase “walk with your toes first, Anya!” Again in her life. 

Now she sat, barefoot, with her legs stretched out in one of the smaller rooms. Dmitry sat polishing some silverware he had uncovered in another one of the rooms, readying them for the next day’s market. 

“When you do stuff like that,” Anya speaks up, as they had been sitting in relatively comfortable silence since she had hobbled in. “I like to fantasize you’re my servant.” 

Dmitry snorts, but his eyes had glanced up at the word fantasize. “People in power like to have affairs with their servants.”

“I know,” Anya is quick to say. She had done enough work throughout Russia to see the dynamic between those in charge and those below them. 

Everyone was equal was bullshit. Especially when the people with power remembered the old ways too well. 

Dmitry sets aside the set he was working on, “And what do I do as your servant?” 

“Come here,” she says, gesturing to him to come closer. Surprisingly, he listens. “You help soothe my aching…” she lifts her right foot up. “Feet.” 

“That is quite the fantasy,” he laughs. 

Anya brings her foot back down and rests it in his lap. “You guys are going to make it difficult to do my job. How hard it is, street sweeping with sore feet!”

“You pout like a Princess,” Dmitry tells her, but he does take her feet in his hands. 

Anya hides her smile, as she lays back on the floor. She swings her other foot onto his lap, so he can work on that next. She lets out a happy sigh and closes her eyes as his hands work her feet. Perhaps she should keep him on as a servant after all. 

His hands slide up from her feet to her calves, her skirts being pushed upwards. There is a pause as he awaits her reaction, but she does not protest as her calves also ache from the walking in heels.

Dmitry has exactly the type of hands she has imagined him having. (Not that she imagines his hands, or him doing this with them. Often.) His hands slide up further towards her knees. Then they are off her, just a cold imprint where he has left her. She lets out a disappointed whimper and opens her eyes to find him suspended above her. 

Her hands press against his cheeks, “This is not my feet.” 

“I didn’t know where else you ached, Your Grace,” Dmitry tells her. 

Oh, he definitely did. 

She lets go of his face, unwilling to bring his mouth to hers. Princesses did not beg, after all. 

“I don’t like you, Dmitry.” 

“I don’t like you either,” he agrees, before pressing a kiss along her collarbone. 

Well, as long as they were both on the same page. 

Dmitry kisses down to below the hollow of her throat, and her lips burn from unclaimed kisses. 

“You just have to say the word,” he says, his lips moving against her skin. 

She shakes her head, as brown eyes peek up at her. He brings his face back up to hers, his nose brushing against her cheek as his lips follow the line of her jaw. Her fingers thread through his hair but she absolutely did not surrender. 

Anya wasn’t even certain how this game began, but she knew, certainly better than she knew anything else about herself, that she was not one who came to lose. 

“I won’t,” she promises. 

-

Vlad had kicked them out of the theater. Apparently bringing each other to high levels of want and leaving unsatisfied and sexually frustrated, put you in a bad mood when next in contact with each other. After several hours of growling and sniping at each other, Vlad declared he could not take another moment of their company. He sent them away, telling them to get their disagreements out of their system before the next day or else he would find his own way out of Russia and leave the two of them here. 

He didn’t mean it, but the two had left just in case he would mean it. 

She had no job to go to, and he had no plans so they ended up in Dmitry’s apartment.

“I don’t like when you talk to me,” Anya tells him as she undoes the braid in her hair. “I find you irritating.”

“Vlad may kill us if we don’t find some sort of truce,” Dmitry says, and he reaches over, his fingers more adept at unknotting her hair. “Why do you do your hair like this, when it looks better down?”

“Hair in my face while I work is more irritating than you,” she responds. “I suppose we must resolve this.” 

Neither of them were really losing if they were doing it for Vlad’s sake. 

Dmitry leans down to kiss her, but she laughs and steps away. 

“You’re so tall,” she complains, her head tilted up to look up at him. “You look like a bird coming to swoop down on its prey.” 

Anya looks around for something, and settles on a chair to stand on. She braces her hands on his shoulders and bends down. 

“You’re right,” Dmitry agrees, taking a step back. “That is rather vulture-like. We need another solution.”

He looks around as though a solution for their height difference would just appear out of thin air. If he could conjure solutions out of thin air, she may have to reassess her opinion of him in general. 

Then he places his hands on her hips. 

“Hold on,” she instructs before he can lift her. She reaches over to unhook her heavy skirt, kicking it away from her and off the chair. She loops her arms around his neck. “Okay.” 

Dmitry looks at her discarded skirt and shakes his head. But then he lifts her, and free from her heavy skirt and thanks to the mobility her bloomers allowed, she is able to wrap her legs around his midsection. They are face to face, nose to nose. Finally equal. 

Then she is kissing him, or he is kissing her. They had been so close it was hard to keep track as to who had made the first move. Just one moment there had been air between them, and the next moment they had not. 

“Okay?” He asks her. 

She nods as she leans back to kiss him again. He is much more tolerable in this state. Quiet and kissable. 

Anya giggles as she thinks it. 

“What’s funny?” Dmitry asks, pressing his lips against her pulse point. 

“Nothing,” she breathes, “I just feel free.” 

He spins her around and she feels the solid wall behind her, and the pressure of his hips against her.

-

It was difficult to not touch Dmitry, she was finding. Whether it was on the shoulder, in his hair, fingers intertwined. She would reach out and he was just there. So solid and warm unlike all the ghosts her mind seemed to be constantly reaching for. 

His hands constantly found her lower back, her shoulders, the back of her neck, or brushing against her own hand. 

Tonight, she left the reading of Russian history up to him, and instead she leans against his back, resting her chin on his shoulder. 

“You have no interest in learning French?” She asks him. 

“We are lucky I can read in Cyrillic,” Dmitry responds, his tone more light than sarcastic. He swats her hand away as it plays with the ends of his hair. 

Vlad had disappeared sometime after the lessons. He was constantly disappearing from them these days. Most likely subscribing to a less that he knew the better when it came to the two of them. 

“You want to go to Paris and stay there and not know the language at all?” 

“Listen to you,” he sighs, keeping his focus on the book. “You didn’t even know you knew the language until five seconds ago.”

“And now I know, I can’t imagine not wanting to know,” she tells him. She not only wants to know everything about herself, but about everything else she may have forgotten. 

“I am Russian, until I can’t be anymore,” he tells her. “Even with all its flaws and follies.” 

He leans forward, and she wraps her legs around him, attached to his back like some sort of tortoise shell, and he sets down the book. 

“What did you learn?” 

“That the royals,” he says, and reaches back to pull her knees away from his body so he is facing her. She finds her back against the makeshift mattress, him hovering above her. “Had about five names they used over and over and over again.” 

Anya laughs, as he kisses along her collarbone. “Says Dmitry.”

“We poor folk are simple,” he replies. He untangles her hair from around her arm. “And can remember two or three names.”

“We royals,” Anya says, twisting her hair up and tucking it haphazardly under her head. “Are in love with ourselves and must keep naming things after ourselves.”

“That’s exactly what the book said,” Dmitry teases. 

He kisses her again, soft pressure against her mouth. She doesn’t know why they had avoided it for so long. A noise escaped from her. 

He laughs against her lips, before pulling away. “You sound like a mewling kitten.”

Anya arches her back up, like a cat, pressing against him. His eyes darken, distorting any flecks of green hidden in the depths away. 

“You sound like a wild boar,” she laughs.

He laughs as well, and she doesn’t think she should be enjoying herself quite so much. Her legs loosen around his waist, as they collapse in a tangle of limbs. 

If he keeps kissing her like this, it will be difficult to keep disliking him so consistently. 

Then Dmitry slides his hands up under her skirt, making it very difficult to not like him at this very moment. 

-

“Do you think they’re after you two or just me?” Anya asks Dmitry as she watches him pack up whatever he has in the small room where he lives by the square. She had collected her wages quicker than she thought it would take, so she has come here rather than wait at the train station for him and Vlad. 

The theater at the palace has been ransacked, they didn’t even have to go near it to see the guards going in and out of it. They never left anything there, so she wasn’t certain what they were looking for. 

Anything of value had probably already been sold by Dmitry in the town's underground market. 

“I would think all three of us,” Dmitry says, pausing to consider this. He keeps his voice low. “Why?”

“I got called in,” Anya points out, not wanting to dwell too much on memories of the unsettling soldier and his not so subtle threats. “And the theater got ransacked, but you’ve yet to be brought in and your place is undisturbed.”

He gives her a quick grin, “Maybe you’re just more easily caught.” 

“Don’t think you’re so invisible,” Anya points out, “People were quick to point out who you were when I started asking.” 

“It’s those big blue eyes,” Dmitry says, coming over to stand over her. “Who was it that told you to find me, you never said.”

Anya leans back, coyly, “I’m not supposed to tell you who.” 

“Loose lips are dangerous in this line of business,” Dmitry tells her. 

She arches an eyebrow at him, “It’s a good thing you’re getting out of Russia then.”

“I know,” Dmitry says, leaning down and setting his hands on either side of her. “Someone obviously really has it out for me.” 

Anya tips her head to look at him, “Poor Dmitry, finding exactly the girl he was looking for.” 

He lets out a short laugh at that, and she grows impatient and bunches his shirt in her fist and pulls him towards her and kisses him. 

She had wanted to do it before, as they had stood underneath the stars and he spoke of his childhood. And then again when he had placed the weight of the music box in her hand before it had transported her into the cobwebs of her memory. And then once more when he had spun her around, with nothing but air below her feet. 

It is truly unfortunate she has to go and like him now. 

“When we cross the Russian border,” he tells her. “You’ll be Anastasia.”

This game they played, as though she wasn’t already her. 

“And I’ll be nobody,” he adds.

Anya pulls at the buckle of his pants, and reminds him, “You already are.” 

Dmitry laughs against her lips, his hips pushing forward. 

The two of them were nothing but an ongoing game of pretend. 

-

“When we reach France,” Dmitry pants in her ear, somewhere over the Polish border in a bed made of straw, amending the earlier promise that this would stop when they left Russia. 

Anya just nods eagerly, her fingernails digging into his back and pushing her hips up, trying to pull him in as close as possible. While she still can.

She is no longer who she had been in Russia, but she is not Anastasia yet either. And he is not who he was in Russia, nor is he whoever he is destined to become. And these blurry lines of identity lead to even blurrier lines in their relationship. 

She feels herself growing around him, like roots intertwining under the soil. 

-

“She’ll break your heart, Dmitry,” Vlad warned outside of Paris. On a hill overlooking the city of lights and possibility. 

But Vlad is wrong because Dmitry and Anya are guarded souls and they stick to their word this time and it’s over in Paris. Almost as though it never happened.

They’re both transformed- him into someone he had never had a chance to be before, and her into someone she had used to be. Allegedly. 

Reality blurs sometimes and he forgets that he created Anya as Anastasia and there is no actual truth to this fairytale. 

Until there is. 

The shared memory of a parade. A hot, crowded parade that had faded to the back of his mind until this Anastasia con….well, situation now had come along. 

It had been natural to run to each other, hold on to each other. It’s what they had been doing since the earlier days in Russia. But then the realization that she was Anastasia had knocked the wind out of him, and the logical, rational part back into him. 

A lie always works best with a little bit of truth. 

So being fully true makes this a win for everyone involved...right?

-

“I always dreamed my first kiss would be in Paris with a handsome prince,” Anya says, standing by the bridge in an elaborate red ball gown worth more rubles than the past four generations of his family could have ever possessed. 

It would not be her first kiss. He wasn’t even her first kiss back in Russia. 

“I’m not your prince, Anya,” is all that he disputes however. 

“The Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov begs to disagree,” she says, storming towards him and he feels the suitcase being pulled out of his grasp. “Dima.” 

And then she pulls him in for her first kiss as Anastasia. A symbolic gesture he supposes. He only hesitates half a breath before he kisses her back.


End file.
